Depiction of UFO report below.

UFO Visitation Awakens Many Memories

Spring Hill, Tennessee

Let me give you a preliminary briefing on a UFO case that I’ve been looking into recently in Spring Hill, Tennessee. This case has quickly evolved into a complex and fascinating situation involving a multitude of paranormal and potentially UFO-related incidents that extend back to the central witness’s early childhood. A 37-year-old married man, he appears to be very credible and stable, is a steady worker, his wife is a nurse, and together they have an 8-year-old daughter. On the night of December 10, 2009, at about 10 p.m., this man and his wife watched in awe as a disk-shaped UFO with several yellowish-white lights around its central rim silently, slowly, and at low altitude cruised their subdivision for several minutes. It appeared to be the size of a regular house and approximately 500 feet off the ground. “There appeared to be several lights in the middle with one dull blood red, non-blinking colored light on top and one smaller yellowish colored light on the bottom,” this man explained to me. “My wife said she doesn’t recall seeing a red light on top, but I do very vividly. We could not tell whether the lights were rotating or flashing back and forth from one side to the other.” Exactly three weeks later, on the night of December 31, at about 8:57 p.m., this man, his wife, and their young daughter watched as a bright orange “sun-like” object approached from the east and passed slowly by them along the southern horizon. Conditions had been cloudy with a low ceiling, so this thing had obviously been below those clouds. This time the man managed to rush inside his home and retrieve a video camera and capture about two minutes of the action. You can also hear the excitement and wonder in their voices on the audio portion of this video, and though you can make out a bright blob of light in the sky, because this man was excited and his camera was handheld the light is dancing around the screen. But at least he did capture its image, which at present is in the possession of the Mutual UFO Network for further analysis by a photo expert.

This second sighting was afterwards confirmed it seemed by a couple of other parties who emailed their brief confirmatory descriptions of seeing the UFO to a site on the internet where this second report had been posted. Immediately after the first sighting, the witness called 911 and was put in touch with the Spring Hill Police Department. I checked with them on the 29th and his was the only report that they had received at that time. I asked if they had found any possible explanation for the sighting, and was told that they had not. The nearby Columbia Police Department informed me that they had no reports at all on that night.

When I visited this couple in their Spring Hill home on Friday afternoon, January 1st, I was impressed by their very apparent sincerity and concern over what had occurred. The wife appeared to be particularly nervous and anxious over the incident and informed us that she had never seen anything like that before. She explained that she never would have reported it, that that was her husband’s doing, that he had been long interested in the subject, and unusual experiences had happened to him for a long time. She said she believed that he was potentially the reason for what they had seen.

Reluctant initially to talk about these other past incidents, explaining at one point that he had not intended to ever tell anyone outside of the family these stories, these background details gradually emerged because I had asked if he had ever had any other unexplained experiences in his life. During that initial interview in his home, as he recalled seeing a “little man” during his early childhood, I wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to complete his account. He got rather emotional as he recalled this memory.

Over the weeks since then we have discussed these earlier incidents in greater detail, in both email and over the phone, and his identical twin brother, who lives in New York State, opened up in email correspondence with me as well about some of these earlier memories too, plus a number of his very own paranormal experiences.

Here is a review of some of these very interesting and potentially significant incidents, along with footnotes that I have written that further explore their implications and correlations to other similar cases.

Are Aliens with their Balls in their Left Hands in their Right Minds?

One of the first things that we discussed further was the incident that occurred to the Spring Hill man years before while he was deer hunting with some friends. “The notes you took during our meeting regarding the incident in Cherry Creek, New York are accurate,” he wrote. “I can’t remember the exact date. However, it was a December, I know that. The year was 1991 or 1992. I would have been about 20 years old. I was wearing a flannel shirt with a red and black checkered coat and camouflage pants.

“In the notes you have me leaning against the tree when actually I sat down with the tree supporting my back and the shotgun leaning against the tree to my left. I looked briefly at my watch and remember that it was 8 a.m. After a few minutes, I spotted a deer on the other side of this ravine, approximately 50 yards away. The deer was a male deer as it had antlers. I could see the side profile of the deer because he walked up and then positioned his body so I could see his whole side. I don’t know why but I didn’t have an urge to try and shoot him. I just watched him for maybe 30 seconds or so, then it wasn’t a deer anymore. It was a person.

“I can’t give you exact details of the person because I can’t remember. I know that it had two legs, two arms and was wearing a tight fitting suit that covered it’s body. The color of the clothing resembled a mother of pearl color. The clothing seemed to glisten in the sunlight. It’s funny though that I can remember those details but can’t see the face of the person. I try to remember and all I see is a round dark fuzzy area where the face or head should be.

“I do remember this person stretching out an arm…it was a left arm. I know this because when he was standing across from me the outstretched arm was to his right when looking at him so it must have been the left arm. The person had a shiny silver ball in his hand that appeared to reflect the sun (like a chrome finish). I watched this silver ball rise up out of his hand and then was almost instantaneously in my face. (1)

“I was looking at this silver ball that was reflective like it had a chrome finish and was about the size of a _ dollar or the size of a golf ball. The ball hovered in my face at eye level and was about 6-8 inches away. That’s all I can remember. Then I woke up. I got up from my sitting position, looked around and headed back toward the hunting cabin. The cabin was about a _ to a _ mile away. I do remember having to walk back through the woods to get back to the cabin that was in a clearing.

“When I arrived everyone had asked me where I had been. I said I must have fallen asleep in the woods. When I looked at my watch it was then 10:30 a.m. You mentioned something the other day that I didn’t think of then but now realize. You said some people who experience things tend to change in some ways, like they don’t eat meat anymore or they become more aware of their environment. I told [wife] last night that I never thought about it before but that weekend was the last time I ever picked up a gun to hunt or kill an animal. I also gave up fishing. I never tied the two together. I just lost interest in it.”

Separately, the twin brother in New York described an odd hunting incident and a similar change for him. He wrote: “I used to be an avid hunter. Absolutely loved bow-hunting. Having hunted for years and been a veteran with many, many hours in the forest, I would say, I was one with nature.”

“The morning started out like any other day of a hunt, climbing into my tree stand, buckling in for safety and using the grunt call. I began to hear the woods speaking. When I say speaking, I don’t mean in terms of voices. It was more like some form of ancient musical instrumentation, and it seemed to be coming from every direction. If you were to take a large clear sphere, place me in it and pipe in sound so the acoustics were perfectly balanced, that is the effect it had. …it only lasted about an estimated five minutes and it was gone. The morning was calm and clear, and maybe for a short time I was hearing the resonant frequency of the tree my stand was secured to?” He mentioned that he had also given up hunting. In a follow-up email, I requested more information. He soon replied: “If I was to put a label on the sounds I heard coming to me, I’d say it was very close to the sounds I would expect to hear from a Didgeridoo, a low resonating hum. I would say the effect of the sounds I heard and the death of the deer I’d shot weren’t real apparent at the time. At least I hadn’t made the connection at that instant. It was however at that instant that I realized I wasn’t going to put myself in a position to cause those kind of feelings again. This animal vocalizing it’s distress to me, pleading for it’s life, reaching into my soul and asking me, why I’d done this. It’s the moments before anothers imminent death that we truly see and hear the calling of the afterlife. Without getting too graphic, most deer will be dispatched rather instantly with a well placed and humane shot. This had always been the case, for me anyway. This time however my arrow took a path that wasn’t conclusive for a quick dispatch. The animal was rendered immobile with a severed spine. The arrows trajectory was changed after deflecting off the edge of the shoulder blade. I was deep in the woods by myself that afternoon and the experience of that day to include the earth sounds and such, just gave me a different outlook. I sold my bow, gave my tree stands away, and asked the spirits for forgiveness. My treks into the woods now consist of nature hikes with the family. To get back to the question at hand…yes, I made the connections of that day shortly afterward.”

The Spring Hill brother reconstructed for me details of his early childhood memories. He wrote: “I get reactions when I discuss what happened to my brother and I as kids because I feel…well, I don’t really know why I get emotional about it…it just happens. I don’t remember waking up that night. I remember that we were standing in front of our bedroom window watching these lights. The best way I can describe it was it looked as though the stars were falling. There were lights that looked like rain…or when driving through snow at night with the headlights on. Then we saw a small person in our neighbor’s yard walking around and picking up what looked like rocks.”

In 1999, while with a group of people who were being hypnotized by a self-styled medium to relive past life memories, this man agreed somewhat reluctantly to “give it a try” after several others had already done “regressions.” He noted how after this hypnotic session that he “started to get clearer memories of that night, even though I was never asked about any of this during the hypnosis.” He suddenly found that he remembered a new detail, a face in the window! “The image is still fuzzy in my mind but I can still see the eye. The eye was large, black and like tear drop shaped with the round end pointing upwards and the pointed end pointing to an angle. Like the drawings you see of the ‘Greys.’ The hand had four fingers that were somewhat long…longer than ours.”

“It may sound odd, but I see my brother and I standing beside one another at windows, tall windows and seeing the stars pass by us,” the brother in New York recalled. “It’s as if we are in some sort of vehicle moving through space. There is a blue hue to our surroundings and an overwhelming feeling of comfort. We just kept looking out the window. …I remember getting out of bed that night, getting my brother and walking through our room door into the blue hue and up to the tall windows. It was as if we were guided by some friendly feeling, of the mind or something. We were being shown something, but by whom, and of what?”

Back in Tennessee, the other twin explained, “I do feel strongly that there is some influence working on my brother and I, probably from birth. My mom used to say weird things always happened around our house like the feelings of presences and the pots and pans would rattle inside the cabinets when we were asleep as babies.”

“The only other incident that gets me emotional is the ‘dream’ I had of the woman being I told you about. I remember I was lying down on something flat on my back looking up towards a whitish light. This person that resembled an insect was standing to my left. This person was about six foot tall and was wearing a white gown. This person spoke to me but never moved his mouth. This person asked me if I found ‘her attractive’ and does ‘she arouse you?’ I looked to my right and there was a creature there that looked…well had a face like a woman and breasts, but skin like a bird. Her legs stand out in my mind…they looked like the legs similar to an ostrich bird. She had grayish blue skin and ridges on her back. The hair on her head resembled bird feathers and they were long…down to her waist and were multi-colored.

“I remember feeling as though I was aroused but I don’t know why. I remember saying in my mind that she was arousing me. As I said this to myself the woman then jumped on me…straddling me…I remember her looking down at me as I laid there. I don’t remember anything else after that.”

Twins with a Psychic Bond

Like many other twins, these two seemed to share a psychic bond. A good example of this was described in detail by the New York brother who wrote: “I was performing some tooling maintenance on a 1300 ton forging press when the ram braking system had a mechanical failure. This caused two pieces of H3 flexor tool steel to come together off center. Because of this, the tools came together with a tremendous BOOM, sending parts of the tool in my direction. I was hit in the chest with some of the flying shrapnel. My first thought was that I was dead, I just hadn’t dropped to the floor yet. I grabbed by chest and ripped open my uniform top to see the damage. To my utter amazement, I only sustained a very large contusion and swelling to my sternum. I was checked out by the on duty nurse and give a ‘you’re very luck’ speech and went back to work after a de-brief from my Supervisor and the Maintenance Chief. It was found that an oversight during a scheduled preventative maintenance check failed to see a crack in the brake shackle.

“I called my brother the next day and told him of my near miss and potentially fatal accident. He was floored and asked me what time this happened. I told him; and he said, at that moment he felt like someone slugged him in the chest. What was amazing is that my brother felt my pain at the same moment and we were 800 miles apart!”

Both have described experiencing precognitive dreams visions and seeing apparitions. The New York brother even recalled having what sounded like “astral projection” or “out of body travel.” “At 13 years old I was laying in my bed and suddenly the ceiling began to turn colors,” he wrote. “It was as if I was looking into a rainbow, only it was swirling counterclockwise slowly. With a voice inside my mind inviting me into the center, I felt as if I was being pulled. The feeling of bodily separation scared me and as suddenly as it began it was over. I began to cry and went to my mother to explain what had happened. She believed I may have been dreaming, but I can tell you that I wasn’t dreaming. …Later in life I had this happen again. I was recuperating at home after surgery I’d had days before. The rainbow effect came to me and I began to separate from my physical body and had the feeling of floating. Looking down at myself a sudden feeling of panic overwhelmed me, I seemed to snap back into myself with great force. I was in such pain, staggering out to my wife nearly collapsing, she took me back to the hospital.”

This brother recalls another surgical experience in which he thinks that he may have been helped by angels. It happened back in late 1991. He had had surgery at the Irwin Army hospital in Ft. Riley, Kansas to repair a damaged left shoulder. He recalled: “The doctor told me that once the spinal block wore off I’d be in a great deal of pain, assuring me the nurses would help with the pain. On the second day, I awoke in so much pain, I scrambled with my good arm to reach the button attached to a cord on my bedside. After pressing the button the nurse came and informed me that the doctor said I couldn’t have any pain medication for another four hours. Something about all the pre-op and surgical meds have to have worn off before other meds can be given. Assuring her that from the pain I was feeling the operation meds are surely gone from my system, didn’t work. Laying in my bed trying to fight away the tears (soldiers aren’t suppose to cry) I suddenly saw relief coming my way. Only as they got closer they didn’t look like your typical doctors. There were three of them and only one of them spoke, but his mouth didn’t move. They were dressed in white robes and two of them had red “cumberbuns” around their waist and the one speaking to me had a gold ‘cumberbun.’ I say cumberbun for lack of a better term. The two with red approached the foot of my bed taking up posts to my left and to my right. The being with the gold walked up to me and said, ‘You’re in a great deal of pain and I’m here to help you.’ He walked up to my left side so he was next to me and placed his hand on my forehead. I felt a breeze come over me as if I was standing on a lakeside pier. I hear this voice tell me, ‘Child, we are here with you …Rest now’ I feel the breeze that was bathing me begin to dissipate and my visitors were leaving. I was saying thank you. As they walked away I noticed that they seemed to glide and they appeared to be moving away from me as if moving down a hallway, but there wasn’t a hallway. …I looked around and no one seemed to see my visitors. My nurse came to check on me and I told her to thank the doctor and two nurses that came to see me. She looked baffled and said, ‘honey, it’s just me here.’ I simply said ‘Oh, okay, can I have some soda pop.’ Mr. Raynes, I can tell you that my visitors, whoever they were, helped me out that day. The thing that I often think of most is that when they came to me I had a feeling of peace, love, comfort, and belonging to something more amazing than modern science can explain. I’ll never forget it and something tells me they will be here to carry me from this life into the next when that time comes.”

“My life has many mysteries…”

“My life has many mysteries and have never quite known how to explain it to people,” the Spring Hill brother noted also. “My wife’s deceased father appeared to me standing next to K. I just started to date K at the time and didn’t know how I was going to tell her that her father was here and wants me to tell her some things. Well, I just told her “K, there is a man who is standing right next to you, he says he’s your father.’ K looked at me kind of like okay, so she started asking me questions about him, like what’s he look like and what is he wearing? The apparition lasted about five minutes.

“When it was over K was in tears and I asked her if she thought I was weird. She said no, she was crying because she believed that her father was with us for a brief moment and she wanted to know how I knew such intimate details of her life with him. I said I don’t know, I only know what he told me.

“I have been asked to explain what happens when I see apparitions and the best way I can describe it is like this. Remember those 3D magic eye puzzles that were popular back in the 90’s? The puzzle doesn’t look like much until you get real close to it and your eyes cross and then the image begins to appear. Well, that essentially is what happens. Sometimes when someone is talking to me their voice begins to do funny things and like the 3D magic eye puzzles I begin to see an image and when that image is close enough I can see it clearly. The image then begins to tell me things or show me pictures in my head. I then relay this information back to the person I’m talking to.”

My curiosity, aroused by his description of how a seeming change in the voice of another could be the catalyst for a psychic perception, I asked that he explain the process a little more. He wrote: “I can definitely do my best to explain what happens when I begin to get an impression or feeling from a person that results in seeing these apparitions. It usually happens without me wanting it to or concentrating on it. When I am talking to someone I usually begin to feel funny kind of lightheaded and feel a change in the environment around me. I then hear their voice…the person I’m talking to, their voice sounds like it echoes and vibrates. It’s hard to describe in words but once this starts to happen I sometimes see a color (white, purple, or blue) that looks like a haze around the person.(2) While this happens I still maintain communication with whoever it is I’m talking to because the visions I get come from the person’s voice. I hear them talking and I see the color…the echoes is what I focus on. It’s the echoes coming from the sounds of the voice that I believe allows me to see what I see. It’s like throwing a rock into a pond of calm water…you see the ripples? It’s what’s between those ripples that I can see.

“I see images either left or right of the person and sometimes behind them. The apparition appears as a grayish mass that extends from the color that is around the person I am talking to. It’s very hard to explain…as I stare at the person and focus on their voice the image begins to get clearer.

“I have had this type of thing happen many times in my life but I seldom tell anybody what I see…the person I’m talking to is completely unaware of what I’m experiencing and seeing. …my left hand shakes for some unknown reason when I have had those experiences. It also gets hard to breath, like I’m trying to catch my breath.”

At this point, I should perhaps point out that this brother is right handed while the other in New York is left handed. This is common, as there reportedly is a high tendency in twins for one of them to be left-handed.

Christmas Eve abduction in DeKalk County, Tennessee?

Woman wonders have they “succeeded in breeding in emotion or soul?”

Following my one hour presentation on UFO close encounters at the December 5th MUFON UFO conference in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, I was approached by a very pleasant gentleman named Don who told me that he was a resident of Lewisburg. My ears perked up and I asked him if he by chance had known a Stanley Ingram, a former resident of Lewisburg, formerly a columnist for the Pulaski Citizen and the author of Unidentified Flying Objects over the Tennessee Valley (1974). Though Stanley had shuffled off his mortal coil late in December 1982, Don knew precisely who I was talking about. Stanley’s weekly Moment of Truth newspaper column had chronicled many UFO reports that he had collected from local residents in Giles, Marshall, and Lincoln counties, as well as detailing his own UFO sky watching adventures going back to 1973, a year that the entire U.S. was gripped by a massive UFO wave.

Don was also familiar with others who had been connected with Stan and the local UFO scene here in Tennessee. One of these Stanley identified publicly only as GP (as GP preferred to stay out of the public limelight). We had met several times through Stanley back in the ‘70s. In fact, when Joan and I got married back in November 1977, we lived for a couple of months in an apartment in Pulaski, and I remember how Stanley and GP dropped by for a pleasant visit one day. Stanley was a talker, always a very friendly and outgoing southern gentleman whose only crime (if one wants to call it that) was becoming obsessed with these UFOs. GP, though always pleasant, was always rather quiet and reserved with us and others I’m sure, and obviously for good reason. We knew that he was a “contactee,” and truthfully, at the time, we didn’t know much more than that. But because he had seen what had happened to his friend Stanley for going so public with his evidence and beliefs about UFOs, GP knew that it was best to keep a very low profile and remain well in the background. Stanley Ingram had formerly been a highly respected citizen of Lewisburg. But as one magazine writer bluntly put it in his article after visiting Stanley and talking to area residents: “Finally not a few of the townspeople now consider Ingram, their former city judge and city manager, to be something of a village idiot.”

Harsh and unfair words for the gentle and caring columnist we had come to call a friend from our very first meeting in July 1975 until his passing in late December 1982.

At the risk of being branded a fellow “idiot” (something that I don’t actually fear, confident I’ll be in good company) it certainly seems that the game is still afoot, even after all of these years. I’m wondering if there is an upsurge in activity here in Tennessee again as Don forwarded this recent email on to me from GP’s daughter Jenny (who has had her own share of UFO and alien encounters going back to childhood), now living up in a rural area of DeKalb County, Tennessee. Her email read:

I think they are back, for what reason I do not know. Christmas Eve, as I was about to drop off to sleep, a small child with very white skin appeared in my doorway. She looked at me and said, mentally, ‘Come on Mama, we need you.’ I left the bed and entered the living room which then became a very bright light. Then I was in a large room about the size of a football field. This room was oblong in shape with shiny metallic walls and was filled to capacity with more of the strange looking children. Then I was in the center of the room. And all the children were taking turns just touching me, stroking my arm, or thigh. They were projecting thoughts of awe, gratitude, and love to me. Many were saying ‘thank you for allowing us to be here.’ They were very loving. I felt from them just overwhelming gratitude.

Strange such a show of emotion coming from them. Were they trying to show me they have succeeded in breeding in emotion or soul? And why show me all of "my children" now? Very strange. I woke later in my bed, very cold and tired.

Soon after receiving this email, Don and I ventured up to DeKalb County and visited GP and Jenny, and were brought up-to-date on all sorts of ongoing high-strangeness, everything from alien visitations, abductions, and Bigfoot encounters. GP even told us that he had encountered a Bigfoot while onboard a UFO! We even got out and hiked a nearby hillside where Bigfoot had recently been reported on their property.

To be continued in the next issue

Reference Notes:

No. 1: This alien left-handedness aspect has appeared in several cases that I’m aware of. For example, back in June 2009, when I was interviewing country singer and entertainer Johnny Sands in Nashville about his alien encounter in Nevada in 1976, he was demonstrating how this humanoid being, from his left hand, had produced a sphere “which was only about the size of a grapefruit, silver colored, and as he held it in his hand it grew into the size of a basketball.” Continuing he added: “Then he let go of it and it began to rotate…. and as it did that he would put his fingers over the top of it and like firecrackers would go off on top of this ball, and as it went off he said, ‘You see, nuclear explosions are causing a problem in the solar system. These things that you’re setting off on this earth are causing troubles not only for you but for us and we cannot have this kind of thing to continue because it is going to upset the balance of everything that we intend for the future.’” Remembering a case in Argentina that was published and illustrated, regarding a report of a humanoid being carrying a sphere, I rifled through my back issues of England’s Flying Saucer Review and was rather startled to see the sphere was again in the left hand! Shortly after 1 a.m., June 14, 1968, at Villa Carlos Paz, near Cordola, Argentina, at the Motel La Cuesta, Maria Elodia Pretzel, 19, had just let two guests out a side door into the parking lot and had turned off some of the lights on the ground floor. She left only three fluorescent lights on in the dining room area and had headed back toward the back door to lock it. The lights were still on in the nearby kitchen and laundry when she was startled by an unexplained light blue glow around the serving hatch, seemingly coming from the bar or dining room areas. She thought that perhaps someone had entered the building and had turned on some other lights. She proceeded to quickly make her way back towards the dining room, and upon arriving at the doorway between the kitchen and the bar she saw a mysterious humanoid figure slightly over two meters tall, dressed in a shining light blue one-piece suit. According to the account written by Dr. Oscar A. Galindez, in the Vol. 26, No. 5, January 1981 edition of the Flying Saucer Review, we read: “The garment covered the whole body from the neck downwards, including the hands and feet, and fitted the anatomy of the entity’s body closely. At the waist the entity wore a slender blue belt. In his left hand he was holding a glassy-looking sphere which irradiated a coherent beam of light – light of a faintly pale blue colour, almost white. The sphere was constantly moving forwards and backwards, and lighting up the whole dining room quite independently of the fluorescent tubes. The entity was smiling the whole time.”

Then in another case, this one written by the same author, Dr. Galindez, a lawyer, in the Vol. 21, No. 5, 1975 edition of FSR, we have yet another eyewitness (one Sr. Luftolde Rodriquez, age 52), a truck driver making a delivery at about 3:40 a.m., September 28, 1972, at a plant in Santa Isabel, Argentina, when he encounters a strange humanoid being. Again the written account reveals the following: “In his left hand he displayed something that looked like a billiard-ball, which was permanently emitting a very white light. The right arm was drawn back somewhat. He was wearing a wide, silvery belt, with a little box or casket of the same color on the right-hand side.”

I would certainly like to hear from any researchers who have documented cases and/or located other published accounts involving UFO entities who seemed to show any sort of left-handed preference. Though this anomaly is not conclusive, it’s interesting since only about 13 % of the human population of this planet is left-handed. So are the “aliens” (or certain of the aliens?) of a dominant left-handed proclivity?

No. 2: Is this what is called synesthesia? Synesthesia means multiple sensing. It has reportedly been found with many people who have had an NDE (Near-Death Experience). Check out P.M.H. Atwater’s The Big Book of Near-Death Experiences.

The man in the case I’m writing about describes focusing on the voice, he detects a change, and then he may perceive a certain color aura, even an apparition, as well as a communication. I seem to recall hearing psychics telling clients how those clients need to keep talking, that they (the psychics) needed to maintain a connection of some sort with their client’s voice.

A woman who described having a UFO close encounter in New York back in 1988, described to me how afterwards she developed more psychically. “I see auras and have dizzy spells prior to earthquake activity. …I also see what I call ‘ashen’ people. They appear all gray, hair, clothes, the color ‘bubble’ that is around them. They are outstanding from the rest of most everyday people because of their lack of color. I have come to realize these people are close to death, somehow, and are soon to cross over.”

Though I didn’t know to ask it at the time, I wonder if she has to hear the voices of these people in order for the ‘gray bubble’ to appear around them?

A Native American medicine woman out in Colorado recently provided me with some noteworthy examples of pretty classic sounding synesthesia. As a young girl there was a “special spot” that she’d go to, she explained, to take refuge “during the hardest times” of her life. This was a quiet, peaceful, and isolated place. It all began one night when she was touched by a mysterious “woman made of light.” When she awoke the next morning she had synesthesia. “Everywhere I looked things had colors running inside of themÉmoving alive color.”

Later when I explained to her how NDE’rs often had synesthesia, she replied: “The near death experience thing makes perfect sense to me, and it was when I was abused the most drastically that I ran to my special spot.” Her multiple sensing consisted of things like if there was an owl nearby she might feel the number 8 and perceive dark purple. An elk might register with the taste of pine needles in her mouth, the number 4, and the color of brown, resembling tree bark. Synesthetes often describe things like being able to “hear” a painting, “smell” a sound, “taste” vision, “see” music, etc.